Succinct

Succinct: A commenter at 538, Thomas Neyman, writes:
So this is bipartisanship: No one agrees on anything, but everyone is happy to play their role. Obama looks like he is reaching across the aisle. The Republican caucus, with few moderates left, fires up the base. And the Dems in Congress get to write their own bill [...]

Poison Peanut Butter

Good thing these guys don’t live in China, where they have the death penalty for shit like this. Actually, I oppose the death penalty — I’m just making a cross-cultural observation.

Paumanok Poetry Award

I’m one of the runnersup for the Paumanok Poetry Award, which is more than just a consolation prize: I’ll be giving a reading next year down on Long Island, at SUNY Farmingdale, which will be cool because I don’t get down that way very often & the award pays enough that I’ll be able to [...]

Open Questions

In Vietnam, literary disputes are public disputes in a way that seems impossible in American literary culture. They show up in the newspaper. Literary questions remain open in a way that they do not in American public discourse, which largely ignores literary questions.  In Vietnam, the stakes are higher. In the US, literary questions are, [...]

Starlings?

A single pair of starlings have been hanging around the feeder the last couple of days — along with all the usual winter birds. I don’t remember seeing starlings in winter before this year. An when you see one, you usually see a flock. This pair dosn’t seem particularly aggressive, sticking to ground feeding, cleaning [...]

Well, That Makes All the Difference, Then

The Rev. Dr. Joseph S. Pagano writes, in a letter to the New York Times Magazine:
Molly Worthen states that “John Calvin had heretics burned at the stake.” Actually, there was only one person executed for his religious opinions in Geneva during Calvin’s lifetime. This was Michael Servetus. Calvin arranged for the accusation and arrest of [...]

Links

The pope sanctions Holocaust denial. Not that I give a shit about the pope. He strikes me as increasingly irrelevant.
NPR abets John Boehner’s lie. In its noon newscast on Saturday NPR played a clip of Rep. John Boehner citing a CBO report as evidence against the efficacy of the Obama stimulus plan. No such CBO [...]

Open Letter to My Enemies

I am sick of my own anger. Sick of its taste. Sick of its smell. Sick of its metalic high-pitched whine like tinitus. Sick of turning it over in my fingers like a dirty pill of bread. Sick of seeing it first thing every morning when I wake up, standing between me & the light [...]

Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Poem

I think there is something weird about Adam Kirsch’s response to the poem Elizabeth Alexander composed & read for the Inauguration yesterday, but I can’t say I find the poem very interesting. That is, I find something 0ff-putting in Kirsch’s tone, but I can’t disagree with his evaluation of Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day.” [...]

New Poem in The Sun

I have a new poem, “Ballad of Crows & God,” in The Sun, a magazine I rediscovered last summer & have been enjoying since subscribing. In many ways it’s an old-fashioned magazine, with its emphasis on autobiography, first person point of view, and direct expression of feeling; all of these characteristics are tempered with a [...]

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